Women Work and World War II

How did women’s work change at home during the war? What about after the war ended?

The iconic image of women during World War II is that or Rosie the Riveter, a beautiful, powerful woman working in a munitions factory, making a muscle, and proclaiming “We Can Do It.” With the quick mobilization after the beginning of World War II, and the sudden rush to war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it was necessary to have all American citizen’s hands on deck. Men were recruited for the armed forces. Women were required to perform duties once solely relegated to men, and jobs that even before the war were said to be only capable of being performed by men. For example, “More than 310,000 women worked in the U.S. aircraft industry in 1943, making up 65 percent of the industry’s total workforce (compared to just 1 percent in the pre-war years)” (“Rosie the Riveter”).

Of course, even before World War II, women had worked in backbreaking labor, in domestic servitude, and on farms. But the Great Depression (when it was difficult for even men to find work) had increased resistance to the idea that women could work, because of fears women would take away men’s paychecks. With near full employment during World War II, this was no longer the case. As well as working at home in hands-on, highly skilled industrial work, 350,000 women also joined the armed services (“Rosie the Riveter”). Although women were officially working in non-combatant jobs, that did not mean they were not at risk, and women still lost their lives in combat, even though some women who served like the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) were still officially considered civilian employees, and their surviving family members were not eligible for benefits (“Rosie the Riveter”).

The war had a seismic shift upon the way women lived and worked. Even women who were not on the front lines were forced into a new sense of independence. Standards of beauty changed, partly to reflect the end of rationing and to make do with the lack of material for elaborate clothing and cosmetics (also long, elaborate hairdos could get caught in machinery). But just as quickly, after the war ended, the official rhetoric began to shift away from celebrating the Rosies of the world and to offer a new, more domestic ideal. As reflected in the wording “Baby Boom,” when GIs came home, marriage and family was on the agenda for many of them. “In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans in their childbearing years had weathered the Depression and a devastating war, and they were living under a cloud of possible nuclear war” (“Women and Work After World War II”). Although women had always struggled for full economic parity with men and acceptance as competent workers, the gendered, often demeaning rhetoric post-World War II was extreme, even compared with the past.

During the 1950s, even popular psychology demonized women who wanted to seek employment outside of the home and fulfillment outside of being wives and mothers (“Women and Work”). Again, this did not mean that women of certain economic classes did not work, or that all women went home, but work again became increasingly gendered, with higher-paying manufacturing jobs once again being characterized as men’s work, rather than women’s work. Statistically speaking, by the 1960s, women still were participating in higher numbers in the workplace than ever before (“Women and Work”).